Vanity Fair’s Unintentionally Hilarious Scientology Photoshops

Vanity Fair is still milking the Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes divorce for all the ink it’s worth, and recently put online their epic, 8,000-word piece on a woman who was once chosen as Tom Cruise’s next girlfriend, made to break up with her fiancee, and generally shuffled around the world and made to do weird sh*t by an army of Xenu-fearing acolytes. Sample excerpt:

Tom Cruise was in a state because he didn’t have a girl. “Can you believe my sister can’t even get me a girlfriend?” he said to David Miscavige, the chief of the Church of Scientology International, as Miscavige joined him and Cruise’s sister Lee Anne DeVette at the opening of the Madrid Scientology center, in September 2004. Miscavige, according to Rinder and Marty Rathbun, Scientology’s former inspector general and No. 2, prided himself on being able to produce with a snap of his fingers anything Cruise desired, as well as to remove whatever he considered to be obstacles in the star’s life, such as his last wife, Nicole Kidman, and his last girlfriend, Penélope Cruz.

I’m an only child so I don’t know these things, but is that really what sisters are supposed to do? Get you girlfriends? Anyway, I could read about weirdo Scientologists all day, but for our purposes here, even more entertaining than the story were the hilariously hard-boiled film noir Photoshops VF uses to accompany the story, which seem to have been created by a failed movie poster designer.

Floating heads inside a silhouette, uh oh, sh*t’s gettin real!

Clearly you can see the design inspiration. BUT WAIT! Do you have anything in a cheesy eyeball closeup??

Ooh, lurid. Get it? She’s, like, the object of his obsession and junk. The apple of his eye, but all semi-literal and stuff. Hey, eyeballs are evocative, just ask that Stephenie Meyer movie.

Moving on, here’s Katie and Suri at the Bobby Kennedy assassination:

“M’yeah, look ovah heah, see? C’mon, dame, lemme get a gandah at those beautiful peepahs! Put down the rug rat and give us a smile, wouldja?”

Anyway, I’m sorry if this was a little too trivial or inside baseball for you, I’m just fascinated by the decision to run an exhaustively-researched, in-depth, 8,000-word piece of investigative reporting and then deciding at the last minute, “Hey, you know what this needs? A bunch of artsy Photoshops from a 14-year-old’s binder collage. Quick! Call Bob’s goth niece!”